Nemens, a Louisiana-based co-editor of The Southern Review, fiction writer, and illustrator, who also maintains a popular Tumblr account of watercolor portraits depicting female members of Congress, will assume the title’s helm on the first of June this summer, succeeding Stein, who joined the Review in 2010.

The choosing of Nemens, says the Times, comes as a bit of a surprise for a literary magazine so rooted in New York arts and culture, which has also, in turn, shaped the careers of many writers whose identities are closely linked to their seminal works documenting Manhattan life (like Jack Kerouac, Lydia Davis, Philip Roth, and the Review’s own prolific founding editor, George Plimpton). But for the five-person committee tasked with selecting its new leader—a group that included Review publisher Susannah Hunnewell, board member Akash Shah, Jeanne McCulloch, and novelists Jeffrey Eugenides and Mona Simpson—that seemed to be partly the point.

“The whole experience required the board to really look at itself, look at the current state of the institution, in ways that we probably haven’t in the past,” Shah told the Times of the team’s efforts to reconfigure the Review’s identity post-scandal. “[Nemens’s] literary tastes, her accomplishments, the combination of her work ethic and her sense of collaboration—both with her writers and her staff—make her a really unique package of talent. This is someone who is on a steep trajectory, and The Paris Review is going to benefit from that.” Nemens also brings a long overdue female leader to the title, which, though edited by several women contributors, has long been run by men at its uppermost tier.

Of her new role, Nemens said in a statement to the Times that she hopes to bring a “spirit of collaboration” with her to empower her staff and that, while she wants to continue the Review’s long-held relationships with its roster of well-known writers, she is looking forward to bringing new voices to the fore. “I think I have an ability to understand and appreciate a publication’s history and prioritize incremental, thoughtful growth,” Nemens said.